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Links for Sept 10, 2009

As everyone else has been announcing, the Tucows FBL is taking applications from the general public. I’ve updated the ISP Information page to link to the signup as well.
Loren McDonald has a blog up at MediaPost talking about how the language marketers use (Blast!) affects how they are perceived in the industry. I think he’s quite correct. Many people on the senders side hear thing things marketers say and judge that the markters are contemptuous of not only the ISPs but also the recipients. Language matters!
Pivotal Veracity announced MailboxIQ this week. This technology allows senders to track what individual users do to their email. Senders are now able to measure inbox / bulk performance for their whole list, not just seed addresses. The delivery person in me thinks this will help senders make better decisions about engaged recipients and give them more data to send mail that recipients want. The rest of me is a bit unhappy with marketers finding a new way to invade people’s privacy. I’m just glad that I don’t use webmail except for handling client issues.
In other news, Mailchimp has been trolling through their client’s response data and discovered that recipients using gmail.com are more engaged and responsive than users at other domains.

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DKIM implementation survey: prelim results

First off, I want to thank everyone who participated in the DKIM implementation survey. This week has been pretty hectic so far, so I haven’t had a chance to actually dig down into the data from the survey, but I thought I’d post some preliminary results.
The ESP survey had 45 respondents. 30% of those sent more than 15 million emails a month.
Of all the respondents: 40% are signing with Domain Keys, 51.1% are signing with DKIM.
Of all respondents: 79.5% are signing with Domain Keys and 78.8% are signing with DKIM to access services (whitelists or FBLs) provided by the ISPs.
50% of those not signing with Domain Keys are not doing so because customers have not requested it.  61% of those not signing with DKIM are not doing it because of technical difficulties with deployment.
The ISP survey had 16 respondents, with 37.5% handling less than 500,000 mailboxes and 18.8% handling more than 15 million mailboxes. 75% of respondents said they are not checking Domain Keys on inbound mail. 56% said they are not currently checking DKIM on inbound mail.
Only 10 ISPs answered the question if they plan to check either Domain Keys or DKIM.

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Permission is not a legal concept

One trap I see companies fall into when looking at opt-in and permission is they seem to think that permission is a blanket thing. They believe permission can be bought and sold by the companies that collected email addresses.

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Maine backs away from new marketing restrictions

The WSJ reports that politicians in Maine have figured out that the new Maine law prohibiting collecting information from teenagers without parental permission is badly written and has a lot of problems.
The Attorney General has decided not to enforce the law as it stands. The law does contain private right of action, so there may be private suits filed against companies.
I can’t necessarily fault the state senator who drafted the legislation for her intentions.

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Links for 9/2/09

People are still talking about the White House spamming. At Al Iverson’s Spam Resource there are two posts, one from Jaren Angerbauer titled Guest Post: Email and the White House and another from Al himself titled White House Spam, Signup Forgery, and GovDelivery. Both are insightful discussions of the spam that the White House has been sending. Over at ReturnPath, Stephanie Miller talks about how the publicity surrounding the spam is great PR for permission.
Stefan Pollard has an article at ClickZ looking at how an apology email in response to a recipient visible email mistake can actually make the fallout worse.
Web Ink Now documents one recipient’s experience with a bad, but all too common, subscription practice.
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Don’t forget to participate in the DKIM implementation survey. For ESPs. For ISPs. Check back next week for results.

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DKIM implementation survey

DKIM has been a hot topic of discussion on some of my mailing lists today. One of the open questions is what is holding up adoption of DKIM. I have my own theories, but thought I’d throw out some questions to see how ESPs and ISPs are currently using domain based reputation.
I have set up two surveys one for ESPs and one for ISPs. Responses are anonymous.
I’ll collect responses for a week and share the results.

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Email as a PR problem

Email is a great way to connect to and engage with people. It is also a medium where the sender doesn’t get to control the message as well as they might in other media. This means that sometimes email campaigns go wrong in a way that drives a national news story about how you are a spammer.
In the stress and flurry of dealing with public accusations of spamming many companies overlook the fact that the underlying issue is they are sending mail that the recipients don’t want or don’t expect. If there is a public uproar about your mail as spam, then there is a good chance something in  your email strategy isn’t working.
Even in the recent White House as spammers strategy, there is a strong chance that they are actually using reasonable and industry standard methods to collect email addresses. However, in their case, they are a large target for people to forge email addresses in forms. “Bob doesn’t like the president, but I’ll sign him up for this list so he can learn how things really are.” or “Joe doesn’t like the democrats so I’ll sign him up for their mailings just to piss him off.”

When you are confronted with an email campaign that upsets a large number of people there are a number of steps you should take.
Step 1: Gather information
This includes information internally about what actually happened with the campaign and information from the people who are complaining.
Externally: Get copies of the emails with full headers. If you’re working with people who do not want to reveal any details of the mail they received then you may not be able to fully investigate it, but if they do you will have everything you need right there. Figure out where their address came from (you do have good audit trails for all your email addresses, right?).
Internally: Talk to everyone who worked on that particular campaign. This includes the geek down in the IT department who manages the database. Figure out if anything internally went wrong and mail was sent to people it wasn’t intended for. I know of at least 2 cases where a SQL query was incorrectly set up and the unsubscribe list was mailed by accident.
Step 2: Identify the underlying problem
Look at all the available information and identify what happened. Was there a bad source of email addresses? Did someone submit addresses of spamtraps to a webform? Was there a technical problem? Again, talk to your people internally. In many companies I have noticed a tendency to try and troubleshoot problems like this at very high levels (VP or C-level executives) without involving the employees who probably know exactly what happened. This sometimes leads to mis-identifying the problem. If you can’t identify it, you can’t fix it.
Step 3: Identify the solution
Once you know what the problem was, you can work out a solution. Sometimes these are fairly simple, sometimes not so much. On the simple end you may have to implement some data hygiene. On the more complex end, you may need to change how data is handled completely.
Step 4: Inform the relevant parties of the solution
Make a statement about the problem, that you’ve identified it and that you’ve taken steps to fix it. How you do this is a little outside my area of expertise, although I have participated in crafting the message, rely on your PR folks on how to communicate this. In the Internet space, honesty is prized over spin, so do remember that.
Every company is going to have the occasional problem. In the email space, that tends to result in the company being labeled a spammer. Instead of being defensive about the label, use the accusation to drive internal change to stop your mail from being labeled spam by the recipients.

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Changes at Comcast Postmaster

Two changes at the Comcast Postmaster page that I think are worthy of mentioning.

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Subscription practices in the wild

It’s always interesting to look at what other email marketers are doing and how closely their practices align with what I am recommending to clients.
Today’s example is a welcome message I received from Marriott. During my recent trip to visit a client, I gave Marriott my email address. They sent me a welcome message, primarily text that looked good even with images turned off. The text of the email told me why I was receiving the email and what I could expect.

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Blocking specific domains

Multiple times in the last few days people have asked me the question “What do you think about blocking domains owned by anti-spam companies as a way to prevent blocklisting?” The question is not necessarily a bad one, and there are cases where blocking mail to specific domains is a good decision. Often, though, if a spam prevention program consists solely of avoiding sending email to people that may be able to cause delivery pain, there are deeper problems that should be addressed.
When I am asked about doing so, my first question is always “Why do you want to do this? What are you trying to accomplish?” Typically, the person asking the question will tell me they are attempting to prevent employees of anti-spam companies from getting mail that they will then report to the operations team as spam.
First, employees don’t always have the ability to get a specific sender blocked just because the sender spammed them. It’s not necessarily something senders should rely on, but often there are policies in place to prevent an employee from using the company to punish a “personal” spammer. And even when someone who can add a sender to their global blocking list receives spam, the listing still must comply with the corporate policies. In other words, just mailing someone “powerful” isn’t enough to result in a block. It may bring the sender to the attention of the company, but unless over all stats and show that the sender is a problem, a listing won’t happen.
Second, employees at companies do sometimes opt in to mail from commercial senders. In fact, I had one discussion with a anti-spam company about a client who was seeing intermittent delivery problems. I sent in the information about the client and the employee handling the case said “Oh, them! I signed up for mail from them. Yeah, they’re a good bunch and their stats are reasonable, they shouldn’t have any more problems.” And they didn’t.
Third, many of us who work in email, particularly those of us who have been around for a long time on the anti-spam side, have our own domains and use multiple email addresses. Just removing clearly identifiable anti-spam domains does not mean that a sender will never spam someone powerful or important. It is impossible to clean off all those email addresses from lists. We have many, many addresses, including ones at ISPs.
One extreme example is AOL.com. Every AOL employee has an AOL.com address and they are indistinguishable from the addresses used by AOL.com customers. But, if a sender spams an employee with access to the anti-spam system, and the stats are bad enough to justify a block, then that sender may see poor AOL delivery. But senders aren’t really going to block mail to all AOL.com addresses, just to avoid that scenario.
When is blocking emails to domains or a set of email addresses a good idea?

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